Vulnerability Detection Result
Arachni could not be found in your system path.
OpenVAS was unable to execute Arachni and to perform the scan you
requested.
Please make sure that Arachni is installed and that arachni is
available in the PATH variable defined for your environment.

Vulnerability Detection Result
Nikto could not be found in your system path.
OpenVAS was unable to execute Nikto and to perform the scan you
requested.
Please make sure that Nikto is installed and that nikto.pl or nikto is
available in the PATH variable defined for your environment.

KVM is an excellent virtualization engine, but it lacks an easy to use user interface. Kimchi changes that. Kimchi allows you to handle the basic management tasks, like creating, starting and stopping virtual machines, adding iSCSI targets, NFS shares, and so much more. The interface is beautiful and it’s pretty easy to set up. Today, I’ll show you how.

Note: Kimchi requires systemd, so Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will NOT work. You might be able to use 14.10, if systemd is installed. I am using Ubuntu 15.04 for this guide, which uses systemd by default.

How to install KVM on Ubuntu 15.04

First, let’s make sure everything is updated and upgraded. I’m working with a minimal installation of Ubuntu 15.04, with only OpenSSH server installed.

This is the first post in the “Build Your Own Cloud” series (BYOC) of guides. Each BYOC post will help you build the foundation of your own personal, private cloud. Today I’m setting my sights on Pydio. Pydio is an Open Source platform that mimics the functionality of Dropbox. There are a few Open Source Dropbox-clones out there, including OwnCloud, which I’ve written about in the past. Pydio is definitely more visually aesthetic than OwnCloud, and quite possibly even Dropbox. It’s also packed full of features. Some of Pydio’s key features include the following.

It’s powerful enough to do everything Dropbox does, but you maintain control of your own data and personal information. You don’t have to pay a monthly fee to get large amounts of storage for you, or your company or even your family. Let’s get started.

Recently I posted a guide detailing how to install OMD (Open Monitoring Distribution) on Ubuntu 14.04. Part of OMD is the Check_MK network monitoring platform. I consider it the best available in the Open Source world. Check_MK supports monitoring VMware ESXi hosts, as well as vSphere servers. It uses the vSphere API to communicate with the host, so it’s able to pull much more data than SNMP. It’s not exactly a very intuitive process to get an ESXi host added to Check_MK, but it’s very easy if you know what to do. The documentation available is sub par, at best. So, I’m going to change that! This guide applies to all versions of ESXi 5 or later. So, ESXi 5, 5.1, 5.5 and 6.

Open Monitoring Distribution (OMD) is an Open Source network, server, and datacenter monitoring platform and it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s basically a bunch of different monitoring systems all pooled into one platform. My favorite part of OMD is that it includes Check_MK, which I think is the best monitoring interface out there. But, it’s a lot more than that. Here is a breif list of what OMD contains (there’s more than this).

Nagios

Icinga

Shinken

Check_MK

Multisite

DokuWiki

NagVis

pnp4nagios

rrdtool

That’s just a brief list of all the greatness that’s packaged into OMD. Every network and home lab should have an OMD installation running on a virtual machine to keep tabs on everything and alert you when something goes wrong. Today, I’ll be installing and configuring OMD on an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. So, lets get started already.

Installing OMD on Ubuntu 14.04

I always like to make sure everything is updated and upgraded when I’m setting up a new server. So lets go ahead and do that.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Now we can get to work installing OMD. Fortunately, there are OMD packages already made for some of the more popular Linux distributions, Ubuntu 14.04 included. You can see all of the available packages by clicking on this link. As of this writing, OMD version 1.20 is the latest so that’s what I’m going to install. Check and see what the latest version is before getting started.

Recently, I published a guide outlining how to install OpenVAS 8, from source, on Ubuntu 14. I got some feedback from some folks requesting a guide on installing OpenVAS on CentOS 7, from the binary packages available via yum. FYI, as of this writing, there are no binary packages for OpenVAS 8, hopefully they will come soon. OpenVAS is a top-knoch Open Source package for running vulnerability scans against networks and servers. Every network administration should have an OpenVAS installation tucked away on a virtual machine somewhere. It’s just so easy to monitor all of your systems for vulnerabilities, there’s no excuse not to. Installing OpenVAS from packages is much easier than installing from source. So, as requested, here you go.

How to install OpenVAS 7 on CentOS 7

Although time consuming, compared to installing from source, installing OpenVAS from binary package is a much less involved process. There are a few ‘gotchya’s” when installing to CentOS 7, mostly related to redis, which I’ll cover in this guide.

This guide assumes you have a minimal CentOS 7 server installation and you are logged into the console or via SSH.

First, we need to install a few prerequisites. To do that, run this command.

yum -y update
yum install -y wget net-tools nano

The OpenVAS binary packages aren’t included with the stock repositories. So, we need to enable the Atomicorp repository.

OpenVAS is one of the most amazing Open Source packages in existence. It is an Open Source fork on the Nessus Vulnerability Scanner, on steroids. If you aren’t familiar with it, let me give you a brief introduction. OpenVAS is short for Open Source Vulnerability Assessment System. it is by far the number one free network and security scanner in existence. I has a database of nearly half a MILLION exploits for nearly every operating system, web app, and device in existence, and that database is constantly being expanded and updated. Installation isn’t too bad, if you have a good guide to help you. Once installed, it’s extremely easy to use. It has a web interface that can be as easy as typing in a host name or IP address and clicking scan. Of course, you can also customize the scans and there is also a handful of pre-configured scans, some thorough, and some less thorough. Reports are generated after a scan completes, which is viewable via the web interface, or you can even generate a PDF report that is useful for a network administrator, as well as upper management, if needed. There are software packages in existence that cost tens of thousands of dollars and fall short of OpenVAS’s feature set. Now that you have a brief introduction to OpenVAS, let’s get started on installing it.

How to install OpenVAS 8 on Ubuntu 14.04

OpenVAS has packages for CentOS and RedHat, which makes it very easy to install on those platforms. It only requires a few yum commands. Unfortunately, they do not have packages for Ubuntu. However, it’s not that hard to install. I’m assuming you have done a minimal installations of Ubuntu 14.04 Server, with only the OpenSSH Server packages installed.